Veteran comic and 'Daily Show' co-creator Lizz Winstead reflects on a wild ride in her new book 'Lizz Free or Die'

If it's not there in your conscious mind, it's certainly there in your unconscious, particularly if you're a regular viewer of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It's the name that flashes by at the end credits every night, under the titled "Created By."

Lizz Winstead will forever be known for co-creating what is probably the most influential cable show of our times, but in her new book "Lizz Free or Die" Riverhead, the veteran writer, producer, stand-up comedian is out to let the world know that she's more than the person who thought up "The Daily Show."

"Lizz Free" is the kind of razor-sharp collections of anecdotes and memories that fans of Tina Fey's "Bossypants" would love of her romp through a life that began in a devout Catholic family in Minnesota. However, it is not, she said, a memoir.

"I call them messays,'" said Winstead, who will be on hand at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Tuesday. "That could be a mash-up of the word memoir' and the word essay,' or it could be essays about my messiness, in the sense that I often dive into things head first without thinking or that I have an alter ego that doesn't always reflect my best self."

Winstead, 50, has worked for decades as a stand-up comic. Besides creating "The Daily Show," she was also one of the founders of the ill-fated radio network Air America, which launched Rachel Maddow onto MSNBC and Al Franken into the U.S. Senate. Her book, she said, can't be called memoir because it's snippets of her life, instead of the totality of it.

"With this book, I focused on the touchstone experiences that let people know how I found my voice and how that voice became comedy and how the comedy in turn began speaking truth to power."

One of those touchstone experiences early on in her career cauterized whatever fear she might have telling jokes in front of paying audiences. In the hilarious "Red Vag of Courage" chapter, Winstead tells of her first paying gig as a stand-up, working as an emcee at the finals of an air-guitar contest at the age of 23. Winstead wore a slashed-up vintage wedding gown, but just before she went on, she removed the tights she was wearing underneath. Later, while on stage, the dress got caught in a movie screen that was being raised mechanically and suddenly, she found herself, her feet three inches off the ground, showing ... everything.

"That was probably a life lesson that I never thought I needed to have," she said. "Aside from maybe vomiting on stage, there is nothing that could freak me out more. Once you're hanging in a vintage wedding dress in front of 1,500 people with your lady gear exposed, there is nothing that can phase you."

The book is full of other experiences in high school, with her aging parents, with shows that she developed that vanished without a trace, and about the experience of establishing "The Daily Show."

In the book, she said, Jon Stewart was the original idea to host, but wasn't available at the time. The job went to former ESPN and Salinas anchor Craig Kilborn. Stewart came on later after Winstead had moved on.

"What we told the executives at Comedy Central was, the one thing that no one has ever done in taking on the news is to become the news. We should operate like a newsroom and act like a comedy show. I didn't want it to be a parody. I didn't want to be the over-the-top guy in the plaid jacket, like Anchorman.' I wanted, with the sound down, for it to look like a real broadcast. The show, as it is now, is amazing, the way Jon and his crew have done it. It's exactly what I had hoped it would be."